GitGuardian vs CodeQL

Free tier available

From $30 per active committer/month (GitHub Code Security)

Free tier covers small teams entirely; business pricing is quote-based per developer.

Free on public repos. For private repositories GitHub split Advanced Security into two products in April 2025: Code Security at $30 and Secret Protection at $19 per active committer/month, both now available on Team plans as well as Enterprise. CodeQL sits in Code Security. Billing counts active committers, not seats, which can surprise teams with many occasional contributors.

Free for individuals and teams up to 25 developers.

Free for public repositories on GitHub.

Widely used

GitGuardian · since 2017

Widely used

GitHub (Microsoft) · since 2019

• Validity checking distinguishes a live credential from a revoked one, which transforms triage priority.
• Scans full commit history, where most leaked secrets actually live.
• Free for teams up to 25 developers.

• Interprocedural dataflow analysis finds real vulnerabilities that regex- and pattern-based tools cannot see.
• Free on public repositories, with results in the GitHub security tab.
• Custom queries let you encode organisation-specific security rules.

• Secrets scanning only — not a general security platform.
• Historical scans on old repositories produce a large initial backlog.
• Requires repository access, which needs a security review of its own.

• Writing custom CodeQL queries is a specialist skill with a steep learning curve.
• Analysis is slow — minutes to tens of minutes, so it fits nightly better than per-commit.
• Private-repo licensing through Advanced Security is expensive at scale.

Any organisation with more than a handful of repositories and no secrets scanning today.

GitHub-hosted projects wanting deep static security analysis, free if the repo is public.